The fracture did not spread the way they had expected.
It did not expand outward like a c***k in stone or splinter along the natural lines of pressure. It did not radiate from a single point of instability. It appeared instead in fragments—isolated, scattered, and yet unmistakably connected.
That, more than anything else, made it difficult to respond to.
There was no center to contain.
No direction to follow.
Only moments.
And places.
And the growing certainty that something fundamental in the world’s structure was no longer singular.
Lucas stood at the edge of Silver Fang’s outer boundary, not where the convergence was strongest, but where the land began to thin into less structured terrain. It was a place he had rarely needed to pay attention to before. The system had always exte
